I've been givingmyself the run-around today, keeping
busy. I actually made some progress on the Finding
Stuff chapter of the Be book, and during lunch I read
the first-edition of The Silmarillion
I picked up at Walden Pond Books (who won their trademark
battle with Waldenbooks, it should be noted). I've read
the Ring trilogy at least three times (some time around fifth
or sixth grade, once in high school, and rediscovered
yet again in college. I may even have read it a fourth
time, or perhaps read just the Two Towers
during my unemployed stretch after college), but I'd
only read the backstory once, while laid up in a hospital
in Princeton after my knee operation, while in high school.
Yet that quasi-religious work for enthusiasts only still
informed my later readings of the trilogy, intensifying
the wistful feeling of the end of an age that itself
was inferior to a legendary golden age.

We've upped the pace, me
sometimes reading for an hour or so in the morning or during
the day on the weekend. The epic has gripped us. Picking
up the other book gives me a way to stay in that world
between the reading sessions, which have proven again
and again to change the way I must read, re-awake my
connection to the sounds of the words and the rhythms
of the language, especially in Tolkien's linguistically
sensitive, never stilted way.

Now I'm killing the last
few minutes before a chat on MSN (the server is publichat.msn.com,
the room is #SD_Interview). Levi is supposed to be
here but has not shown up yet, so I may have to
do the promo myself. Wish me luck. (Even after the
fact, I could use it.)